With Saoirse Ronan as a questing heroine and Cate Blanchett as her fateful nemesis, Joe Wright's 'Hanna' is one original girls' night out

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Picture Snow White on the run from her wicked witch of a stepmother—only this time, no prince shows up to rescue her, with or without a kiss, and no kindly huntsman does, either. She has to figure out how to rescue herself. That's the nonstop thrill of Joe Wright's Hanna, a mash-up of family ­tragedy, high-tech CIA action movie, and vivid tropes from the ­Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, whose tales have less to do with fairies than with the unearned cruel­ties of life and death. The movie stars a ­mesmerizing Saoirse Ronan (whose first name is pronounced seer-sha) as its young heroine; Eric Bana as her father, Erik Heller, a former CIA agent; and a supremely witchy Cate Blanchett as the Teutonically named Marissa Wiegler—a powerful CIA operative whose enmity for both dad and daughter is the key to the story's ­secrets. Shot in four countries, Hanna is an exhilarating breakout for Wright, a British director known for his gritty realism, who made his reputation with a pair of memorable period pieces—his earthy Pride & Prejudice and the ­elegant Atonement, which put Ronan on the film world's radar. Fast-paced and full of ­wonders, this is Wright's most audacious movie yet and may prove to be one of the best of the year.

Courtesy of Wright and cinematographer Alwin Küchler, Hanna instantly plunges us into another world, at once familiar, strange, and breathtakingly beautiful, with an aerial pan over vast expanses of glittering snow that leads to an evergreen forest hiding a primitive split-log cabin right out of "Hansel and Gretel."

With her crinkly blond hair, white eyebrows, ice blue eyes, and fair complexion, Hanna looks like part of the fauna of the northern Finnish landscape. Like many a fairy-tale heroine, she's motherless; all that remains of Mom is a strip of smiling ­photo-booth portraits that Hanna pores over in ­private as if trying to solve the puzzle of ­herself. Dressed in animal skins like her father, she's both predator and princess, as innocently savage as the snow foxes and the stag she brings down with a single arrow, only to exclaim, "I just missed your heart!" as we see her reflection in the eye of the ­dying stag.

All this is consonant with the refuge ­Hanna's father has created to keep her safe while he teaches her every useful thing he knows, from a half-dozen languages to the most efficient ways to kill, with or without weapons, as they prepare for the inevitable confrontation with her nemesis. His final gift is to let her decide when she's ready to bring it on—literally, by flipping a switch that will signal their location to Marissa's eye-popping CIA redoubt deep beneath the Moroccan desert.

There's nothing natural about the grimly spectacular underworld where Hanna is taken. A high-tech riff on classical mythology, this is Marissa's domain, a place of death and experimentation, ­heavily ­guarded and all but drained of color. The exception is Blanchett's ­Marissa, with her impeccably coiffed red hair, even redder lips, and—in one of Wright's most inspired touches—a close-up of the blood ­oozing from her gum line after she's flossed. Fittingly, this murderous locale is also where Hanna makes her first human kills, and we begin to suspect that she has supernatural powers (or that she is, as the lab report she's stolen has stamped across the top, ­abnormal). In the movie's only cliché, we're treated to a ­sequence of acrobatic fight scenes between Hanna and serial squads of CIA foot ­soldiers. But just as the film threatens to turn into The Matrix for girls, Wright gives us something much better: the oddly piquant sight of this childlike teen on her knees, head down, scooting like an animal through the labyrinthine air ducts beneath all that stony grandeur in a headlong effort to ­escape.

Hanna has a dreamlike aspect in its narrative leaps from one locale to ­another, but that's also her journey's declension into reality—from the pristine forest of her father's wintry paradise, now lost, to a derelict fairy-tale theme park in a shabby part of Berlin, where the climactic showdown plays out. But finally, what's most striking about this boldly original film is how utterly solitary its female protagonist is. A family that Hanna travels with for a time fascinates her; we watch her study them the way an anthro­pologist would. Later, she meets a boy, and they almost kiss, but she pulls away at the last ­moment. Like her adversary, she refuses to be domesticated.